Many businesses and other facilities, such as banks, stores, airports, etc., make use of security systems. Among such systems are video-based systems, in which a sensing device, such as a video camera, obtains and records images within its sensory field. For example, a video camera will provide a video record of whatever is within the field-of-view of the camera's lens. Such video images may be monitored by a human operator and/or reviewed later by a human operator. Recent progress has allowed such video images to be monitored also by an automated system, improving detection rates and saving human labor.
In many situations it would be desirable to automatically identify the video image regions which are water in the real world. Likewise it would be desirable for state-of-the-art surveillance systems to adapt to the variations of the scene caused by water areas, as current systems are unable to do so, even if the same systems have been monitoring the same scene for many years.